Central Board of Secondary
Education
Promoting Heritage Education Programmes in Schools
As you are aware CBSE has recently launched several programmes to promote heritage education in schools including the celebration of World Heritage Day, Adopt-a-Monument programme and functioning of Heritage School Clubs. The Board firmly believes that heritage education is important for the following reasons:
- To bring history and the social science curriculum alive for the students through active learning and doing.
- To promote awareness of and involvement in heritage to inculcate a respect for diversity, tolerance, mutual understanding, patience and promotes peaceful co-existence in school children.
- To inspire young children and encourage them to build a future through an understanding of the past and the present.
- To equip children to understand and explore their local heritage and gain a confident sense of self.
- To encourage children to learn about national heritage as well as gain exposure to different heritages around the country.
Heritage is a conceptual identity of an area which includes not only built tangible heritage but has intangible aspects like its language, lifestyles, ceremonies, festivities, work cultures inherent /specific of a community.
To create and enact a heritage education programme for your school, you need to draw a Plan of Action comprising activities, programmes and projects planned through out the year depending on the resource availability. Just a small local site visit can bring alive a number of aspects of a history textbook. For this, an activity sheet would need to be designed and an expert found to conduct the walk. If no expert is available, a teacher can lead the walk with a little research. For heritage education programmes we need to encourage schools and teachers to use local resources and fall back on local monuments, museums and experts.